SXSW 2011 Log
Milan Andric (Analyte Health) @mandric
This was my second time attending SXSW Interactive, the first being 2007. That was the year of Twitter, this is the year of Facebook and the Game Layer, but more about that later. The event has grown quite a bit, people complained about overcrowding, panels overflowed, twitter raged, press people had to wait in line, Mother Theresa cried a little bit. It wasn’t horrible for me personally, I missed two panels but went next door and still got something out of it. I was surprised to find that many people skip the keynotes entirely preferring to watch them online after the event. I suggest hitting the keynotes as they really speak to the broader conversation happening and clues you in. Keep in mind, this is an event to socialize, network and engage with people of all aspects of the tech industry. Innovation manifests through a cross-discipline approach and you might say “the magic” happens outside of the panels and sessions, in conversation between small groups and individuals. SXSW Interactive is easily the most invigorating and innovative tech event of the year, hit the parties, talk to folks, get on the twitter and you’re guaranteed a great SXSW experience.
Many of the events described below already have an audio archive of the talk, and some of the presenters also provided slides or other presentation materials. When possible these link are provided. Please enjoy. I have transcribed my notes for myself as much as for others, I understand it is a chore to wade through, feel free to parse it at you leisure. Also if you really like this bit of work, please link to it on your blog or website, thanks!
Here’s the permalink: http://m.andric.us/post/4151785594/sxsw-2011-notes .
SXSW Day 1
How not to design like a developer
Chrissie Brodigan (Mozilla/Firefox) @tenaciouscb
Chrissie is a soft spoken designer for Mozilla, has a background in Journalism and History and she likes open source. She started programming during the day in college to help pay the bills. Her panel was about bridging the cultural differences between open source projects and designers/creatives. She finds it is hard to contribute to open source as a designer and also believes strongly that insufficient design in an open project leads to failure. Appearance matters, open source projects need good docs and how a project presents itself builds confidence and leads to acceptance and ultimately success. She wants to promote design specific tools for developer like tasks, like bug tracking and version control. One interesting player I found in this space while perusing the expo was Designica, they build Art Management Software as a service for $30/month per designer. She also mentioned Sparkle Share which is like dropbox except with a Git backend.
Play At Work: Agile Games for Productive Teams
Christian Nelson (Carbon Five) @carbonfive
Christian is a developer who works for Carbon Five and seems to be a master of process. In this panel the audience actively went through some agile processes, namely defining the basic unit of work on an Agile team, a story. He defined a story as a promise for future conversation. Stories should be pretty small, demonstrate value to a user, describe a whole feature, not include interface detail and are easy to accept. They related the Agile process to a mock product that resembled twitter. He also talked about games as ritualized activities that we repeat, that are cooperative and have easily repeatable rules. The interface mockups he presented were created in a tool called Balsamiq, which looked pretty cool. I did a bit of research and found a similar tool, Tiggr that seems to be available for free.
OMG - My Pancreas Just Texted Me
John Pettengill (Razorfish) @JohnPettengill
This guy is an amazing experience designer in the Health 2.0 space. He is a diabetic and partnered with another designer to work on a mobile application. Right now the application only exists in mockup form, but much of the interface has been flushed out. The key problems the project defines are; patients are isolated, the current solutions are clinical, and forever is really hard. 85% of patients are looking online for information, there are several established sites where patients can participate in communities helping each other. We need to create new solutions and new tools. Chronic disease is managed all day long and tools are needed to help manage that. He believes we need to remake the tools that handle diabetes and reducing forever into steps. The current patients are isolated, find it hard to change alone and the current solutions are clinical. He notes that your doctor can’t come with you but your phone can. He wants to create an app that is focused on behavior and moving forward. 45% of the US population has chronic disease including Crohn’s, arthritis and heart disease.
SXSW Day 2
It’s Nature’s Way : Innovative Tech Design Through Biomimicry
Mobile Health Apps in Africa
- Douglas Naegele (Infield Health)
- Jaspal Sandhu (Gobee Group)
- Josh Nesbit (Medic Mobile) @joshnesbit
- Patricia Mechael (Center for Global Health and Economic Development at the Earth Institute Columbia University)
In this panel several people gave their experiences about mobile technology, namely mobile phones, that helped to influence health care in rural parts of the world where health care is not readily available. They all talked about using SMS and their experiences with a mobile platform for delivering health care.
Josh Nesbit told a story about his project in Malawi where he was able to double the amount of patients being treated using mobile technology. He used software called Frontline SMS to coordinate large amount of SMS messages and brought 100 mobile phones to the hospital and trained care workers to use them. This reduced the amount of time and money spent communicating and traveling between the hospital/doctors and care givers/patients.
Jaspal Sandu is a Lecturer of Community Health and Human Development in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He had an “Ahah!” moment working with migrant workers in the farms of the central valley in California. Many of the workers were using unsafe sex practices and bringing diseases like HIV back to Mexico. Nearly every worker had a mobile phone.
All the panelists seem to agree that technology has potential to create efficiencies and there is great opportunity in mobile. Yet understanding effectiveness in mobile health is hard because there is not enough evidence and there are too many pilots. Banking and business are already capitalizing on mobile and health is catching up. Data collection is a bad word and nobody likes to be studied. The environment in the US needs major sorting out, citizen centered health care and designing for patient experiences is growing, particularly underserved populations.
Keynote Opening Speaker
Seth Priebatsch (SCVNGR) @sethpriebatsch
Seth was a force to be reckoned with, his energy was borderline “on happy pills” but once you start listening to him he’s an amazing speaker. His talk is on the list of the most entertaining and energetic I have ever witnessed. He’s 22 years old, left Princeton after his first year and founded a startup now backed by Google. He’s all about building The Game Layer on top of the world.
The Game Layer is something we can use to motivate real behavior. He sees the game layer as radically changing the way we do school, which he considers “broken,” customer acquisition, location based services and how we deal with global warming.
“School is a game, just a poorly designed one.” There are two major problems, engagement and cheating. The grading system is not designed using positive progression, unlike points or levels. The disincentives for cheating are misapplied. Tests at Princeton are not proctored and this works and relies on the social fabric to prevent cheating.
In customer acquisition he talked about Groupon and how they use simple game mechanics to motivate their customers. Groupon gives the impression of a “free lunch” and addresses skepticism, incorporates communal game play by making a deal a group activity and includes a countdown to spike engagement. He exemplified American Express as a company that understands brand loyalty and status because they introduced the different level of cards (gold, black, etc…) that allow you to “level up.” Recently location based services like foursquare, scvnger and mytown have become mainstream and are using more game mechanics like rewards and quantitative easing. “Rewards work!”
He made an interesting point that, “moving something from impossible to very difficult is a big win.” He believes in the power of communal game play and demonstrated it in the keynote arena with a surprise game that everyone in the audience played. He setup some key game mechanics and limitations that relate to global warming: lack of communication, trading patterns, decentralized leadership, countdown, joint goal, epic meaning and blissful productivity that is a core part of human nature. He emphasized communal gameplay + communal discovery. The game was setup by handing out 1 of 5 large differently colored cards to everyone at the event as they entered. The goal of the game was to get every row in the arena with the same colored card where each row was separated by the aisle in the middle. The limitations were you had to remain in your seat and complete the color of the row before 90 seconds. I’m not sure how many people were in the main ballroom but they accomplished the goal in less than 60 seconds and each row held up their cards. Seth was in utter amazement it happened so quickly and donated a sum to charity. It seemed quite profound at the time! I’m not sure if the game was just too easy or that Seth’s charm had just worked on me.
Massive Health
I think Aza found his way into the schedule somewhat late because he was not in the printed schedule nor the online schedule, I still don’t see him there. I overheard some people talking in the other health panel and was able to locate his talk. For those who don’t know much about Aza Raskin he was the creative lead on the firefox team and now he has his eyes on the health industry.
Aza talked about human psychology, feedback loops, delayed gratification and human nature. He played the marshmallow video that I’m sure many people have seen where children are told to wait before eating a marshmallow. He sees the body as a design problem and in terms of interfaces. He asked questions like “Why do heart attacks and cancer come without any warning? Why does our body give us no feedback?” He thinks we could motivate people to take their entire 30 days of antibiotics if there was a blue stained circle on your hand and incrementally faded until you finished your dosage. His dad recently died of pancreatic cancer, and like many people in the health field there is a very personal story there related to his experiences with the health care industry and related products. He has a history of doing very small controlled experiments with people to validate a user experience hypothesis. He mentioned several products that are measuring our bodily functions, like number of chews and steps walked during the day. He demonstrated a live blood glucose measurement on a willing volunteer, which seemed more like a stunt than anything worth noting. But he did point out that the state of the art related to home blood glucose kits results with you a seemingly random number that is displayed. So it seems an obvious device to begin innovating. Aza has joined the “renaissance in medicine” and is working on bringing the feedback loop to healthcare.
SXSW Day 3
Future Fitness Meetup
This was an interesting setting with around 50 people opening up the floor to discuss the future of fitness. The room was filled with personal trainers, engineers, doctors, entrepreneurs, designers and business people from independents to project managers at Nike and Adidas. The discussion was focused around complaints and the challenges trainers faced in tracking data, fragmentation between devices and a loss for a standard platform to put structured data into and pull it out.
Keynote
Christopher “moot” Poole (Founder of 4chan/Canvas)
Christopher was funny and quite a different type of geek than the previous keynote speaker, Seth. He seemed quiet and a bit shy, definitely uncomfortable on stage under the hot light. He seemed a tiny bit unprepared and parched from the night before. It was funny when the poor guy had to ask for water as if the SXSW crew was torturing him by tossing him out under some artificial desert environment forcing him to entertain. Nonetheless he gave a great talk and he had a deep understanding of internet community and culture and true appreciation for it. While at SXSW he was interviewed by the NY Times.
27 (Fun!) Ways to Kill Your Online Community
Patrick O’Keefe (iFroggy Network) @iFroggy
This was a fun talk where those of you who run a website with an active community you want to keep should listen to. Here are a few things you can do to kill your community; Start religious and political discussions! (Assuming your site is not about discussion of these topics!); Change things and tell no one! Add or remove a feature and have no announcement. (People like when they are involved in changes.)
SXSW Day 4
HealthTap’s South By South Health Meet Up
Ron Gutman (HealthTap) @RonGutman
HealthTap founder, angel investor, TEDx Silicon Valley curator, white-hat health hacker, builder, serial hugger, world explorer, accelerator.
Keynote
Felicia Day (Creator of The Guild) @feliciaday
Felicia gave an interview and told her story about how The Guild was created. The Guild is a web series about online gamers that was created on donations for the first season, there was one show a month. Now it is a successful web series, moving to the big screen and sponsored by Sprint. She did most if not all of the bootstrapping herself including marketing and crowdsourcing through twitter and social media.
A Billion Columns? No problem: an Introduction to the Cassandra Database
Jonathan Ellis (Riptano, DataStax, Apache Cassandra) @spyced
Jonathan gave an excellent overview of the Cassandra database. Cassandra is a decentralized database that came out of Facebook and was heavily influenced by Google’s Bigtable and Amazon’s Data Store design documents that were published a couple years ago. It follows a CAP model (consistency, availability and partition tolerance) of reliability instead of an traditional ACID model.
SXSW Day 5
Keynote
Blake Mycoskie (Founder TOMS Shoes) @TOMSshoes
This was another inspirational keynote where Blake gave us the stories and some hints about the future of TOMS Shoes. He talked about how he got the idea for TOMS when he ventured to Argentina, he came back 5 months after getting the idea and gave 10,000 shoes away (shoe drop). His basic message was that not only does giving feel good, but giving is good for business and branding. It increases customer and employee attention. Your customers become your biggest advocates. TOMS didn’t have to focus on advertising as much as giving. TOMS also retains an amazing group of employees that desire to be a part of something important. He thinks every business should give a day off to employees to volunteer somewhere as group, to give and serve together and focus on someone else. Because of the giving he also attracted amazing partners. Ralph Lauren never collaborated with anyone for 40 years until he designed TOMS Rugby brand. AT&T did a commercial and told TOMS story for him just because he was a long time customer and had a great story.
“Who is Tom? There is no Tom. If you buy a pair of shoes today we give a pair tomorrow. Tom is an idea for a better tomorrow.” What is next for TOMS? One major goal happened in 2007 when TOMS did a 50,000 shoe drop in Africa. TOMS is now changing and becoming the 1 for 1 company and there is a mystery box to be opened on June 7th. Blake claims, “This will be the first step in meeting the needs for the rest of the world.”
Semantic Web and HTML Meetup
This was a fun meeting because you could interact. It started out small and grew into a fairly sized group about 20 minutes in. Several of the attendees took the meeting to one of the free venues and continued the conversation over drinks. Most of the time was spent chatting about RDF, Taxonomy (which some companies view as IP), Microformats, Classification, and things related to controlled vocabularies. Several experts showed up like the creator of dmoz.org (the open directory project), the lead developer of Facebook Open Graph Protocol, an engineer from Monster.com who maintains their resume ontology (which is quite valuable to them and has taken years to develop) and a woman from the Dow Jones and Reuters who manages vocabularies. We chatted about what RDF is, how to “declare” a vocabulary, which consists of publishing an RDF document. It seems the library sector has been developing some of these methodologies for years, and the experts say the place to start building your vocabulary is at the library or talking to a librarian, that experience could likely make for an amusing followup blog post. I asked some questions like, “If you wanted to start your own vocabulary where do you begin, is there a mailing list for RDF, etc?”. It seems like a very difficult subject to break ground on. The Stanford OWL group was also mentioned but I had trouble digging up much information on them.
